If Mine Were A 
Preathen City. 


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Hf Mine Were A Heathen City. 


Text: “J am debtor.’—Romans 1: 14. 


Paul announces his obligations, he proclaims his liabil- 
ities, he declares his indebtedness, he tells us what he owes. 
He is heavily embarrassed. But it is not the fact of debt that 
distresses him. He is not worried for fear he may be unable 
to meet his obligations. It is anxiety lest somehow he may 
shirk payment that stirs him. Having announced the fact that 
he is in debt, he names his creditors. “‘I am debtor both to the 
Greeks and to the Barbarians.” How can he owe these people 
anything? He has never had any financial transactions with 
them. They do not know him and he does not know them. 
They have never heard of him and he can refer to them only 
by their nationality.. To people with whom he has had no 
business dealings and no commercial correspondence and not 
the remotest personal contact, Paul says, “I am debtor.” 

Having named his creditors, he tells how he proposes to 
meet his obligations. “So as much as in me is, I am ready to 
preach the gospel.” Paul proposes to pay his debts by preach- 
ing the gospel. It is a strange method of debt-paying. It :s 
rather an airy way of facing one’s creditors. It is somewhat 
emotional. It is altogether too sentimental a plan of canceling 
indebtedness. “Paul, you would better get down to a cash 
basis.” Paul, however, has full confidence in the currency he 
proposes to use. He is not afraid that it will go to protest. 
He has no fear that it will be rejected or even questioned. He 
says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the 
power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” 

Stranger than the list of creditors and stranger than the 
proposed method of payment is the ground of obligation, 


4 


Paul is in debt because he has been blessed. We regard debt 
as the sequence of disaster or as the result of limitations. Paul 
has incurred debt by riches received. He is a debtor to preach 
the gospel because he has received the gospel. He owes 
Christ to others because he has Christ himself. He must not 
be selfish. What Christ is to him, He can and would be to 
every human life. Paul has no right to sit still and enjoy the 
blessings of redemption while others are in need of that which 
he can give. 

This is a brand new kind of obligation. It is an unheard 
of sort of debt. It is the Christian view of privilege. It is this 
conception of obligation that makes the Christian church a 
missionary church. 

The Christian is debtor to people he has never seen. They 
do not know him and he does not know them. They have 
never heard of him and he can refer to them only by their 
nationality. His creditors are Greeks and Barbarians, people 
of culture and people without culture, people of China, of 
India, of Africa, of the islands of the sea, all people of any 
land who have never heard the gospel and who do not know 
of Christ. 

The only way the Christian can pay his debt is with the 
gospel. He need not be afraid that it will be rejected. It is 
what the world most needs. It is the currency with which 
God meets his obligations to mankind; and if the mighty God 
could cancel his debt to the human race with the gospel, surely 
it will pay mine to my fellow man. If it was efficient to 
make eternal payment of the liabilities of Jehovah, I need not 
fear it will go to protest when offered in payment of my obli- 
gations. 

My debt was contracted in the same way as Paul’s. I am 
a Christian. Some one or many made it possible for me -to 
hear the gospel. It was not because I deserved it. I had done 
nothing to merit such a favor. It is all of grace, I do not 





5 

know why I was born in a Christian instead of a pagan or 
heathen land. I do not know why I was born in a Christian 
home, with parents who belonged to the church and whose 
first care was that I should know and love their Saviour. You 
do not know why that little daughter whom you love better than 
your life was not born in India, where she might have been a 
child-widow at the tender age of four years; or in China, 
where the birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity. . But 
somehow I know Him, whom to know aright is life eternal. I 
have a Christian’s view of God and man and the world and 
home and country and heaven, and because I have, I.am debtor: 
Shame on me, if in such a day of grace, I close tightly on what 
I have received, and doubling down in stolid selfishness, re- 
pudiate my debts! 


MIN Beto CHRISTIANTCITY. 


Because it is, it is a good city in which to live. The fact 
that mine is a Christian city helps to make it a profitable 
city in which to do business. Because it is Christian, it is a 
good city in which to bring up children, to have friends, to own 
property, to follow a trade, to practice a profession. It is far 
from being: a perfect city, to be sure. There is much that 
might be better. But the bad is not because of the city’s 
Christianity. It is in spite of it. The city has social and civic 
blemishes because it is not as Christian as it might be. It is 
the Christianity it has that makes it a city where personal 
liberty is guaranteed, human life held in high esteem, child- 
hood protected, womanhood respected, home honored, wifehood 
and motherhood reverenced, and things that are true and 
beautiful and good celebrated and sought. 

Suppose it were not a Christian city. We are so ac- 
customed to it that we are wont to take our Christianity as a 
matter of course. Suppose mine were a heathen city. All 


6 


cities are not Christian. There are heathen cities in the world. 
What if my city were one of these heathen cities? What 
changes would take place? 

I have never been in a heathen city. I have been in some 
American cities where Christianity was at low ebb, and where 
the seething tide of wanton vice and immorality reigned. 
I have been through certain neglected sections of great Amer- 
ican cities where the sodden wretchedness of human misery 
rotted in damps of sin whose ignorance bordered on the night 
of heathenism. But I have never been in a city where heath- 
enism reigned. I cannot answer the question as well as some 
missionary who has seen a heathen city ; and seen it not as the 
passing tourist who sees only its strange shows and curious 
sights, but who has gone down into its awful decay and 
breathed its moral stench and come into living contact with its 
blank, black despair. While I cannot answer the question as 
well as such a missionary I can at least give a partial answer, 
and name some of the things that must go with the loss of our 
Christianity. 


IF MINE WERE A HEATHEN CITY 


The first to go would be the churches. We should have 
to tear down every Christian church in the city, and close every 
Sunday school and wipe out every mission. We should have 
to raze the Young Men’s Christian Association. If the city 
were heathen, it would stop the mouth of every preacher 
and abolish Sunday as a day of worship and as a day of rest. 
This is the first and most evident change to take place. The 
churches and all that they stand for must go. This is not all. 

We must close the public schools. There are no public 
schools like ours in a heathen city, except in Japan, whose 
school system was taken from our own. One of our missionary 
agencies is the day school. The public schools are not free of 


7 


faults. It is an easy achievement to criticise them, but they 
are vastly better than the conditions they supplanted, and they 
are immeasurably better than no schools. The Episcopal 
preacher who declared the public schools are turning out a 
generation of “lusty young pagans ”’ said what very few of us 
believe and what the facts do not warrant. The public school 
system is an indirect product of Christianity. We should 
lose it if the city were heathen. 

Then the hospitals would go. They do not exist in hea- 
then lands, save as they have been introduced by Christianity. 
The hospital is one of the missionary enterprises of the church. 
In India, Dr. Scudder, in charge of a hospital to which thou- 
sands come to be healed, is doing three men’s work. If the city 
were heathen, we must close all public and private hospitals, 
hospitals for incurables, for women and children, for the 
crippled, for contagious diseases, and all those institutions which 
exist for the relief of human pain and the care and cure of 
human sicknesses. We must give up the medical profession 
as we have it now. Then if a man should fall on the streets, 
there would be no ambulance to carry him and no cot to re- 
ceive him. Should your child fall ill, there would be no physi- 
cian to come with intelligent skill and healing remedies, but 
instead a creature, with wild incantations, to add plague and 
torture to the little sufferer. 

Next to go would be the orphan asylums and homes for 
the aged and friendless, and institutions for the care of defect- 
ives and afflicted. We should have to close the day nurseries 
and tear down the homes for the insane, where those who have 
lost their reason find a refuge. All of these aged and helpless 
people and these defenseless children must be turned out in 
the storm and left on the streets should the city become 
heathen. 

The next to go would be our organized charities, for there 
is no organized charity in a heathen city. We should have to 


8 


relinquish Associated Charities with their sane and unselfish 
work, the Charitable Societies and their splendid beneficence ; 
the Industrial Homes and Rescue Missions, where the man out 
of work and the prisoner fresh from serving his sentence may 
find a helping hand; the Florence Crittenton Homes where 
the sinning and outcast may step through a door of hope; and 
all those other agencies in a Christian city by which the needy 
and the worthless are lifted to self-help and set on the road 
to industry and respectability must cease. 

If the city were heathen, we should lose the city govern- 
ment under which we live. It is frequently the ground of just 
complaint because of existing abuses, but compared with what 
passes for government in a heathen city it is as day to dark. 
We denounce the system of “graft” which obtains to a greater 
or less extent in many American cities, but the “graft” we 
groan over is a virtue compared with the shameless extor- 
tions and brazen injustices practiced by the heathen officials of 
a Chinese city. Civilization with its free institutions, its sense 
of justice, its respect for law and order is the outcome of 
Christianity. With an oriental miscalled court of justice and its 
reign of terror instead of what we have, property values. would 
tumble, trade would suffer irreparable loss and conditions of 
living would become far harder. 

This is not all that would happen were the city to become 
heathen. There are invisible values, more precious even than 
those I have mentioned, we should lose. It would take from 
us our immortal hope and faith in Christ, our Christian expe- 
rience with all its peace and fortitude. If ours were a heathen 
city, we should be heathen! 

Recently I was shown two photographs. The first was 
of a man suffering from club foot. He was terribly deformed 

and badly crippled. His deformity was a handicap that made 
existence hard and work difficult. The second was ofthe same 
man, taken three months later, after he had been healed by a 





2 


Christian surgeon. The deformity was gone. The man stood 
square and flat-footed on two good feet, and was ready to 
measure equal with his fellows in the race of life. 

That kind of relief is a great boon, and that is a part of 
the work of missions. Christianity has a gospel for the body. 
But there is a blessing infinitely more precious. It also takes 
the deformity out of the soul. It was spiritual as well as 
physical hurts the prophet had in mind when he proclaimed 
the blessings of the gospel age and cried, “Then shall the lame 
man leap as ani hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.”’ 

All this would go were the city heathen. You could not 
say, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” You could 
not pray, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” You could not 
teach the children, “God so loved the world, as to give his 
only begotten Son.” 

There is one thing more that would happen should the 
city become heathen. We should have to go to the cemeteries 
and erase every inscription of hope from the memorial stones 
over the resting places of our beloved dead. No minister would 
stand by our side as the clods fall on the coffined dust and 
say, “But we look for the general resurrection and the life of 
the world to come.” There would be no word of hope and no 
vision of home. No invisible but real Friend would stand near 
us in our sorrow and whisper to listening faith, “Let not 
your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me. 
In my Father’s house are many mansions.” , We, and our city, 
and our dead should all be heathen. 

These are some of the things that must take place. It is 
no fancy sketch. The best must go. Who would care to re- 
main in a city so spoiled? You are saying that life would be 
intolerable with all these gone. So it would for those who 
have once tasted the gospel. It is Christianity that makes 
mine a good city in which to live. And my city is Christian, 
because in the march of events there were men and women 


10 


who felt as Paul did and who said: “We are debtors.” “We 
have received and we must give.” It will be kept Christian 
only by such people. And the cities which are now heathen 
will become Christian only as those who have heard of Christ 
recognize their obligation and pay their debts. 


THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE. 


This is the reigning missionary motive—“‘I am debtor.” 
No one who dwells in a Christian city and is a beneficiary of 
Christian civilization, whether he believe in the personal Christ 
or not, can repudiate this obligation, without condemning 
himself at the bar of God and mankind. 

A man says to me, “I do not believe in Foreign Missions.” 
I ask him, “Then what do you believe in? If you do not be- 
lieve in Foreign Missions, you do not believe in Christianity, 
you do not believe in humanity, you do not believe in phifan- 
thropy, you do not believe in charity, you do not believe in 
education, you do not believe in character, you do not believe 
in fraternity. What do you believe in? If you do not believe’ 
in Foreign Missions, you do not believe in anything worth 
believing in.” The missionary enterprise is the enterprise of 
mankind. 

What is needed is for this conviction of debt to the heathen 
to take possession of the Church. It is not merely the sending 
out of a few more missionaries. We need to send them and 
many*more. It is not merely the giving of a few more dollars. 
We need to give thousands where we are giving hundreds. 
But in addition to all else there is needed the moving, steady, 
resistless, cumulative momentum of the conviction that every 
Christian is a debtor and that he can cancel his debt only with 
the gospel. There need be no fear that the church may do too 
much for this cause. Someone asked Phillips Brooks what he 
would do were he called to take charge of a church heavily in- 





fp 


volved in debt, greatly discouraged and rapidly disintegrating. 
He replied: ‘The first thing I should do would be to take up 
a collection for Foreign Missions.” The church need not be 
afraid it will bankrupt itself in paying its debt to the heathen. 


A MISSIONARY HERO. 


Some sixteen years ago, on the threshold of my ministry, 
I became pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Alexan- 
dria, Va. On the first Sunday of the New Year, January Ist, 
1888, I received into the church a lad of eleven years of age 
named Frank Slaymaker. He was the first to unite with the 
church on profession of faith during my ministry in Alex- 
andria. The incident was my introduction to one of the most 
devotedly Christian families in the parish. He had a brother 
Henry, two years his senior, who was already in the church, 
and a sister a few years older still. These three with their 
widowed mother made the household. When Mrs. Slaymaker 
gave her children to the church she did so without reservation. 
The boys developed in their Christian characters and were 
active in Christian work. Henry was elected an elder on 
reaching young manhood. | 

One of the most interesting and important missions in 
Africa is the Congo Mission of the Southern Presbyterian 
Church, with a church organization at Luebo, 1,000 miles from 
the coast, numbering over 2,000 members. It has also been the 
costliest mission of the church both in money and workers. 
For two years the Southern Church had been praying for a 
business manager for this mission. Henry Slaymaker, with 
a bright business career before him at home, offered .him- 
self and was accepted. It was deemed best that he should be 
sent out as an ordained minister. He was examined and or- 
dained an “extraordinary case.’”’ He had never attended a 
theological seminary, but his examination was so satisfactory 


ont &- 


that a member of the Presbytery declared “his examination 
showed his mother to be a better teacher than a theological 
seminary.” 

Three months ago young Slaymaker sailed for the mission 
field. He had almost reached the end of the long journey 
when the mission steamer Lapsley, in ascending the Congo, 
capsized and Henry Slaymaker and twenty-three natives were 
drowned. 

. Just as he was reaching the field where he was so sorely 
needed and for which he was so peculiarly fitted, he was taken. 
We cannot understand such a loss. Is it a loss? No, it is a 
glorious investment. Since Christ laid down his life for the 
world’s redemption no life similarly consecrated is lost, whether 
death come soon or late. 

The Sunday following the fatal accident, in his home 
church in Alexandria, there was held a Memorial Service of 
Henry Slaymaker, and at this service they actually gathered 
a memorial offering to raise the Lapsley and prosecute the 
work. It is such splendid faith as this that will conquer the 
world. 

In a letter received from one of the Secretaries of the 
Church, he says: “There must be no turning back now. On to 
Luebo must be our cry!” 

Splendid heroism! May the devotion of this young mar- 
yr fire our faith. Christ gave his life. What am 1] giving? 
It is the cause to which I can never give too much, and in 
which what [ do never can be lost. 

I am‘debtor! God help me to pay my debts! 


For copies of this sermon apply to 
THE BOARD OF FOREIGN Missions, R. C. A, 


25 East 22d Street, New York 


